Haldane's brief was to design a government machine that was fit for purpose after the first world war, the organisational challenges of which had exposed huge weaknesses in pre-war, rather amateurish, arrangements.

Almost 100 years later, there is a strong argument that the challenges of 2012 are of a similar magnitude, both because of the lingering effect of the credit crunch and also, perhaps more fundamentally, what is increasingly recognised as the end of the postwar settlement – the period of political consensus that followed the second world war.

Haldane did not arrive at his silo recommendations without careful consideration. One of the key passages of his analysis considered the dilemma of two alternative organising principles: "First, the principle of allocating functions according to the persons or classes to be dealt with and secondly, allocation according to the services to be performed." Haldane's report argued against the first, because it would be difficult to limit the number of departments needed to cover all "classes".

His pragmatic judgment was that departmental structure, substantially unchanged since then, was the right way forward, but he stressed the crucial need for "co-operation between departments in dealing with business of common interest". Despite his hopes, the result of Haldane's report has been, as Simon Parker pointed out in his recent article on civil service reform, too much "departmentalism" and too little cross-cutting policy development.

However, in 1918, information "technology" consisted of the telephone, telegraph, fountain pen and liveried messenger. Modern IT means it is no longer necessary to choose between either a structure based on departments or a structure based on the needs of citizens and consumers. New technology allows the Haldane dilemma to be resolved, by making the data of invidual citizens available. The modern relational database allows an inquiry to be made from any perspective and, most importantly, from combined perspectives.

This means the "horizontalisation" of government becomes possible, because vanilla services are delivered to multiple service users, who are themselves dealing with the groups of citizens as they naturally cluster together in patterns of need.

Similarly, an individual who is a member of more than one group is visible through many views, and it becomes possible to create joined-up government because there is no longer a "left hand-right hand" problem where different departmental "factories" are trying, and failing, to deliver a coherent outcome.

In terms of the structure of government services delivery, the key challenge moves from a factory-focused one of getting the most efficient operation in the running of the delivery machine to the citizen-focused one of ensuring that all of the impacts on the same individual – who will be affected by a number of domains of policy – are consistent and do not compete with one another. As things stand, the activities of each department can be separately good but the combined effect on the citizen is negative – this is the equivalent of saying "the operation was a success but the patient died".

Instead, common services can now enable a frontline civil servant to access the embedded wisdom and rule-set of the entire administration through a set of "rules engines" while he or she is able to focus on the citizen or customer and adapt the outcome of the policy "engine" in light of their human appreciation of the circumstances of individual cases.

The "Tell us Once" initiative is an early indicator of this thinking but is predicated on the existence of the departmental silos. Instead, we should be thinking about using technology to break down those silos.

Haldane's options were constrained, but those technical constraints no longer apply and we have no excuse for not making use of them to make public administration both more efficient and more responsive.